Google parent company Alphabet added nearly 9,000 new employees in the past year

Google parent company Alphabet has added nearly 9,000 employees
to its payroll over the past year.

The company finished Q1 with a headcount of 64,115 employees,
according to its earnings report. That compares to 55,419
employees in the year-ago period. And it's up a
couple thousand from the 61,814 that Alphabet had just a few
months ago, at the end of 2015.

Alphabet is one of the internet industry's most dominant
companies, generating $20.3 billion in the first quarter. But
investors are worried about its spending.

The increasing headcount is especially interesting since Alphabet
has slowed down its once feverish acquisitions of other companies
in recent months.

Alphabet CEO Ruth Porat said during the conference call that "the
vast majoirty of new hires continue to be engineers and product
managers in areas where we’ve prioritized investment such as
cloud and apps."

She noted that the core Google business, which consists of
search, Android and other web services, experienced the largest
numerical increase in staff, but the Other Bets companies, such
as Google Fiber and biotech firm Verily, saw the largest
percentage increase in headcount.

To put Alphabet's roughly 64,000
headcount in context, Facebook finished 2015 with a total of
12,700 employees.